This article was originally published on ETFTrends.com.
We may often come off as skeptical about AI in this newsletter. Our skepticism is primarily centered on the AI capital spend and AI company valuations rather than the AI tools themselves, which we have found both useful and exciting. In that spirit, I'm going to walk you through a simple example of how we have used AI tools in our research process.
Our portfolio has had a fair amount of international exposure over the last 9 months, so I wanted to create a monitor of how various countries have been performing of late. I can pull a list of foreign ETF trailing returns with no effort, but what I really wanted was a map so I could easily see regional variations vs. single country variations.
There's no driving business need for this map and it's unlikely to generate a dollar of revenue. And so just a few years ago, I would not have bothered to take the week or so of time it would have taken to write and debug the map code myself. With ChatGPT (or Claude or Gemini or your LLM of choice), I no longer needed to consider whether making that map was worth a week of my time because I could now accomplish it with about 30-60 minutes of active time while ChatGPT did the brunt of the work.
I began by double checking with the LLM whether I had an exhaustive list of single-country ETFs. It suggested three countries I hadn't included, but it turned out these had been de-listed anyway. I ended up with a list of 44 countries that have dedicated US-listed ETFs.
We may often come off as skeptical about AI in this newsletter. Our skepticism is primarily centered on the AI capital spend and AI company valuations rather than the AI tools themselves, which we have found both useful and exciting. In that spirit, I'm going to walk you through a simple example of how we have used AI tools in our research process.
Our portfolio has had a fair amount of international exposure over the last 9 months, so I wanted to create a monitor of how various countries have been performing of late. I can pull a list of foreign ETF trailing returns with no effort, but what I really wanted was a map so I could easily see regional variations vs. single country variations.
There's no driving business need for this map and it's unlikely to generate a dollar of revenue. And so just a few years ago, I would not have bothered to take the week or so of time it would have taken to write and debug the map code myself. With ChatGPT (or Claude or Gemini or your LLM of choice), I no longer needed to consider whether making that map was worth a week of my time because I could now accomplish it with about 30-60 minutes of active time while ChatGPT did the brunt of the work.
I began by double checking with the LLM whether I had an exhaustive list of single-country ETFs. It suggested three countries I hadn't included, but it turned out these had been de-listed anyway. I ended up with a list of 44 countries that have dedicated US-listed ETFs.
3 months ago
